Organ Sound Art Festival – Investigating the Organ (interview)
Interview with Jan Høgh Stricker, curator of Organ Sound Art Festival, by Ivna Franić
Having settled comfortably into its mid-December slot, the Organ Sound Art Festival has come to present Copenhagen’s experimental music heads’ favorite way to close out the concert and festival year. First started in 2016, the festival takes place at Nørrebro’s KoncertKirken, taking advantage of the former church’s relaxed vibe and, of course, its organ. Among this year’s highlights are two performances by Sarah Davachi – one solo and one with the Copenhagen Clarinet Choir; the German ensemble gamut inc; commissioned collaborations between Henning Lundkvist and Ingri Høyland; and Ed Atkins and Chris Shields.
In addition to its niche focus, the Organ Sound Art Festival also maintains an elusive online presence, with no dedicated social media channels or website offering a peek into the festival’s archives. This is one of the reasons why a deep-dive interview seemed like the perfect opportunity to plunge into the whole story behind the festival. The other reason is that Jan Høgh Stricker, the festival’s curator since 2019, is a very pleasant conversation partner and was comfortable demystifying the process of putting together an experimental music festival.
Sparing you our discussion of Southeastern European wine and other topics not directly pertaining to the festival, here is everything you always wanted to know about the Organ Sound Art Festival but never dared to ask – from the general ideas and principles behind the festival, the organ’s place in the experimental music scene, and its relationship to visual and sound art, to this year’s program and Høgh Stricker’s curatorial approach.
P/A: Could you give us a brief history of the festival? How did it come about and who is the team behind it?
JHS: “The festival was started by Björn Ross, the director of KoncertKirken and the driving force behind the venue. He started the festival in 2016 and curated the ’16, ’17, and ’18 editions. Then he invited me to co-curate the festival in 2019, and together with visual artist Steffen Levring – who was a central part of the 2019 edition – we wanted to professionalize it a bit. We applied for a lot of money because we wanted international headliners for the festival; we made posters, a decent graphic, a social media campaign, and things like that. We wanted the festival to grow and I thought it was really fun. After brainstorming the lineup for that year’s festival, we still had about a hundred names we wanted to invite, so it made sense to continue the collaboration.”
“We started to develop this whole idea of broadening the perspective, focusing on the visual arts, on instrument builders, and on sound artists who could build the instrument in a way.”
P/A: Did you also have a different approach to curating the lineup?
JHS: “I wouldn’t say different. Maybe I had a wider network and some fresh ideas to go beyond the Copenhagen experimental music community. Also to expand the notion of organ music by including writers, performers and visual artists in the festival. That year we presented works by visual artists Joseph Beuys and Hanne Darboven.
We also invited Rie Nakajima, a Japanese-British artist who works mainly in performance. We just asked her if she could do something with the organ, and she came for a few days and worked with it. It wasn’t a commission in the strict sense, but it was a little residency where she came and stayed in the church. So we started to develop this whole idea of broadening the perspective, focusing on the visual arts, on instrument builders, and on sound artists who could build the instrument in a way.”
P/A: The festival has been tied to KoncertKirken from the beginning, right? Have you ever thought about expanding to other venues?
JHS: “Yes, it’s tied to KoncertKirken. It’s not that KoncertKirken has the most spectacular organ in Copenhagen, but it has a space that’s different from normal church spaces, which we think is essential for the festival. Because it’s a former church, they don’t have the church pews, which is the first thing that makes it nice to play and experience music there. Especially with organ music, because you don’t have your back to the organ.
Organ music is quite alienating because you can’t see the performer, there’s a distance and a weird hierarchy between the audience and the organ, which is on the wall behind you. You always hear the pipes in the reverberation – you hear the pipes and the organ filtered through the acoustics. We invite a lot of artists who have taken organ pipes and built their own instruments, so we can – in a way – put the organ on the floor, get the audience very close, and stage the performance in a way that is very different from regular organ recitals. I think that’s why it belongs in KoncertKirken and why it makes sense to hold the festival there.”
P/A: Was that something that was important to the festival from the beginning, to separate it from the organ’s usual connection to the liturgy?
JHS: “I mean, we don’t have a lot of liturgical organ music at the festival. Maybe we’ve had some, and it’s not important to distance ourselves from that, but as a festival, we’re more interested in the timbre and the power of the organ than we are in church tonalities, church songs, and so on. We’re interested in exploring the instrument, its power, its technology and mechanics, and not so much the Christian tradition.
But the spirituality or the religious connotations travel with the instrument, and we can’t ignore that. It’s also fun for a lot of artists to play with those connotations. Even the very minimal pieces carry that spirituality in some way.”
P/A: So how would you describe the central concept of the festival, beyond just performing organ works, because the name also says “organ sound art“?
JHS: “The full name is Organ Sound Art Festival, and it could be called something else, but it points to the fact that we are investigating the organ as an instrument. It is possible to deconstruct the organ, take it out of its context, and look at it and listen to it in different ways. That is why I think – if it were just called an organ festival, for example, people might mistake it for a church music festival. The term “sound art” has its own problems and connotations – in many ways, it feels like sound art is a very established discipline associated with the multichannel system and installation art. But I like visual artists working with sound. For some people “organ music” has weird connotations, and for some people “sound art” has weird connotations, but maybe they cancel each other out [laughs], I don’t know. Because for us, the concept of the festival is very close to the organ in the expanded sense.
There is a lot of drone organ music out there, some of it quite popular, but we want to go beyond the very minimal, droning stuff. The organ has so many pipes and so many sources of sound, so it’s kind of an immersive instrument. But you can easily just stay there for a long time, sustain three notes, and that is enough – maybe you add some digital effects or whatever. I’m oversimplifying, and, of course, those kinds of works are very welcome and sometimes included in the festival, but we’d like to go beyond that.”
“The whole idea is that the idea of an organ is so broad that it can be almost anything, we are exploring the organ in both a mechanical and a metaphorical sense.”
P/A: So how would you describe this expanded approach to the organ?
JHS: “It doesn’t even have to be an organ instrument – it can be metaphorical, it can be any kind of container that makes a sound when you blow air through it, but it can also be digital organs or virtual organs. Two years ago we had the Copenhagen Clarinet Choir perform a piece for the festival and we were like – okay, these five clarinets are now an organ. The whole idea is that the idea of an organ is so broad that it can be almost anything, we are exploring the organ in both a mechanical and a metaphorical sense.
One of the most important things for us is the whole idea of collapsing this weird hierarchy of the organ being up there. The term “deconstruction” is used a lot, but I think it makes sense. You have this big instrument with the pipes inside the furniture, and just taking what’s inside and pulling it out is a kind of deconstruction. And not just the pipes and the notes that the pipes play, but the whole technology. For example, you have the bellows, which is a kind of breathing. Some artists just work with the sounds of the bellows.
I think that’s what challenges the notion of organ music at our festival and what I find fascinating over and over again. I still have a hundred names on a list of artists that I would love to work with if we could afford it!”
P/A: Despite the still-long long wish list, the festival actually seems to have featured quite a few of the artists that experimental music fans might first think of in the context of organ music…
JHS: “I don’t know if we’re still riding the wave of organ music from some years ago – there were many artists working with the organ at some point. A lot of them came from Stockholm and we had an internal nickname for them – the Stockholm Organ Mafia [laughs]. We presented almost all of them at our festival. They’re all super talented, so it’s not in a negative way, I’m just saying that you see a lot more organ in contemporary and experimental music than you did thirty years ago.
Ellen Arkbro, Kali Malone, Maria w Horn, Anna von Hausswolff… They all played at the festival. Some of them have proven to be the kind of headliners that draw audiences that wouldn’t normally come to an experimental music festival. People would come because Anna von Hauswolff is a big name, and that’s fine with me. It’s a way to kind of “un-niche” this super niche festival a little bit. I think this is also important because it makes the festival more welcoming.”
P/A: How do you find the balance between being extremely niche and opening up the festival to a wider audience?
JHS: Of course, it’s good that the festival is a niche thing, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be exclusive. There’s one other thing I’m trying to do. Well, sometimes I’m too tired and I have this weird history of getting sick when the festival starts, but when I’m not – I try to host and present all the acts. In a way, it’s like – okay, who’s this annoying person who has to introduce all the artists – but it’s really just a way to make it less exclusive.”
P/A: Do you feel that the majority of the festival’s audience comes from the classical or experimental music scene?
JHS: “We try to reach the more classical contemporary audience, but I’d say it’s mostly the same audience that goes to ALICE, Mayhem, Festival of Endless Gratitude, and MINU Festival… We’re trying to get the same small audience in Copenhagen. We can fit 130 people in KoncertKirken and that’s definitely the limit of this festival. I mean, it can still be hard to reach an audience of 130 people, but I’m not even sure if there are 400 people in Copenhagen who would be interested in this festival – well, at least not three nights in a row – and that’s okay!”
P/A: Now that you’ve mentioned some other venues and festivals, how do you see the Organ Sound Art Festival in the context of the Copenhagen festival landscape and the music scene in general?
JHS: “When people ask me, “When’s the festival this year?” it’s a great feeling to know that it’s kind of established itself in the Copenhagen festival scene. Even though it’s a niche festival and the audience is around 60 to 130 people per night, it still feels like, okay, we have a festival, and people are looking out for it every year.
We put it in December because no one else was doing festivals in December and we didn’t want to compete for the same audience. I exchanged ideas with the Festival of Endless Gratitude, and in my first year we had a collaboration with ALICE. We hope to attract some of the people who go to some of the other festivals.
We see ourselves as part of this little music-organizing environment in Copenhagen where you go to see each other’s stuff. The local artists that play our festival could just as well play Mayhem next week, or the Festival of Endless Gratitude, or whatever. But one thing that makes us a little different is that we take artists from a more classical contemporary background. For example, this year we have Mads Emil Dreyer, who is a classically trained composer who studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, as well as the ensemble NEKO 3. These two different kinds of experimental music have a hard time meeting in Copenhagen because they’re tied to different institutions.”
P/A: So you are filling a gap here and trying to make a connection between different parts of the scene?
JHS: “Exactly. I mean, I see some festivals now… Festival of Endless Gratitude, for example, used to be focused on psych and free folk and stuff, and now they could easily have a string quartet. And I’m very excited about that. But that’s also what we’re trying to do, that we can have a clarinet choir and a small ensemble and flutists with classical backgrounds and put them on the same night as, say, Chris Shields or Jonas Olesen, who come from very different backgrounds and have different approaches. It would be nice if the audience followed those traditions!“
“I think that’s the future of the festival, to try to create some kind of international network (…). That’s the possibility of being a niche festival, that you can connect with other niche festivals.”
P/A: What about the international context of a festival dedicated to organ and sound art?
JHS: “The thing about being part of the Organ Sound Art Festival is that every week we get emails from artists all over the world who want to perform at our festival. It’s not just because we have such a great reputation, it’s more because there aren’t that many festivals that focus on organ music.
We work a little bit with Orgelpark in Amsterdam – Björn goes there every year, and their director was here for our festival last year. They are interested in doing co-commissions and stuff like that. There’s also a festival in London called Organ Reframed, and we’re in dialogue with their artistic director. I think that’s the future of the festival, to try to create some kind of international network and do co-commissions, visit each other’s festivals, help each other out. That’s the possibility of being a niche festival, that you can connect with other niche festivals.”
P/A: Would you say that there is a strong international organ scene?
JHS: “There is, because there are a lot of artists who come to us and say this is just the kind of festival for them. There are also other festivals and events that focus on experimental approaches to organ music. Orgelpark has their festival in June – five or six days with a lot of weird sound art. Organ Reframed is a bit bigger than us, but we have some of the same artists. And we can definitely exchange artists and help each other discover new artists.”
P/A: Is this also a good opportunity for Danish artists to go to other international festivals?
JHS: “Of course, it would be an opportunity for us to recommend some of the talented artists working in Denmark to other festivals. Some of the artists in our local scene are already internationally established artists, but they haven’t played these kinds of festivals. So even a small festival like ours can see what we can do internationally for the artists we feature.”
P/A: And how does the curating process and organization work? Do you contact the artists you are interested in and then figure out together what they want to do and if it is possible?
JHS: Mostly we figure out together what they want to do. We mimic contemporary music festivals in the sense that we book a lot of commissions. We try to do that because it pays the artists a lot better and we get new site-specific or festival-specific work. It’s an ambition to have a high percentage of newly commissioned work – I’m not sure, but I think it’s about 40-50% of what we present, which is super nice.”
P/A: Some of the commissioned pieces are collaborative, bringing together artists from different fields or scenes. How does it work with commissioned collaborations – do you approach one of the artists who then chooses the collaborators, or is it the festival that tries to encourage certain interdisciplinary connections?
JHS: “Sometimes we have some suggestions, but mostly it’s up to the artists. Usually we reach out to the artists and have a dialogue about what they would like to do and who they would like to work with if we invited them to do a commissioned piece at the Organ Sound Art Festival. And then we discuss what’s possible.
For example, this year we have Chris Shields and Ed Atkins. I think everything Chris does is extraordinary, and I know he has never worked with the organ before, but we asked him, “If you were to do something for our festival, who would you like to work with? And then he said maybe he could do something with Ed. They hadn’t worked together before. We gave them the church space to come and experiment, they applied to the Arts Council and got some money so they could actually produce a new performance.”
P/A: Looking at the lineups of the Organ Sound Art Festival over the years, part of it is people from the more classical organ scene, but then some of the other artists seem like less obvious choices. Do you just think about which of the artists you like might be interested in working with the organ?
JHS: “That’s basically it. It’s not a disadvantage not to have worked with organ before. I mean, in some cases it would be, but for example, Ed and Chris, if you kind of trust what they do, you just give it a try.
Or, for example, Sandra Boss is a composer who has played at the festival several times. In 2016, Bjørn invited her to come and work with the organ, and now she’s been working extensively with the organ for the last almost 10 years, and playing the festival got her interested in it. So it’s a way of inviting artists and saying, okay, let’s just see what happens. Take your artistic practice and just apply it to the organ.”
P/A: So you could say that the Organ Sound Art Festival has a direct influence on the music scene.
JHS: “A little bit, we hope. I know I’m repeating myself, but for me personally, the most important thing is the community. People come and hang out, they want to be part of the festival, they want to meet the other artists… They’re not just passing through. And the other thing, I guess, is that we commission new work.
Because organ music can sometimes feel like a box that you check, where you kind of know what it is and what to expect from it, and we want to add chapters to that. Even in the modernist tradition of organ music, it’s still very much tied to a trained organist and a kind of score with the organ on the wall. We are very interested in deconstructing the whole idea of the instrument and the tradition of organ music.
Some years we have also talked to local organists and asked them if we could put together a small program within the festival of some works from the modern and postmodern tradition. So a small part of the festival is a “real” organist who knows the organ and can actually play works from a score. I think that’s always been a success. The whole idea is that we don’t have to erase that tradition, we just have to look at what’s interesting in it.”
“The whole idea of the festival is encapsulated in asking a writer to create a text-based performance piece for the event, which is just as justified as asking a composer to write a musical composition for the main organ.”
P/A: But maybe it’s also good to have a little bit of that to contextualize the rest of the program?
JHS: “Exactly, it helps contextualize it. Because it’s not like we have this whole church organ music here and then we have our experiments over here. Of course, there’s a kind of history with all the minimalist stuff that’s definitely part of it.”
P/A: Talking about this year’s program, is there anything different from previous years? What are you most looking forward to?
JHS: “From the first year, I had the idea that we could do one of my favorite pieces, which is Steve Reich’s Four Organs. I mean, it’s a very canonical organ work from the American modern tradition. I really love it and I’m so happy that we were able to find a small ensemble that wanted to do it. It’s not a piece for pianists or organists, it’s a percussion piece, so there are five percussionists performing it, and I’m really looking forward to that.
What else? I mean, we’re more local this year than usual, and that’s largely because of finances. We didn’t get as much funding – normally we would have foreign names making up about half of the program.
We asked Sarah Davachi what she wanted to do, and she really wanted to work with clarinets, so we paired her with the Copenhagen Clarinet Choir. She’s really excited to come because the pieces she’s performing are a solo recital and a recital with the clarinet choir. This piece can be for any kind of instrument that can sustain a tone, and she hadn’t performed it with clarinet before, so it’s an opportunity for her as well. I mean, she’s been on the list for six, seven years – she’s just a composer that we really wanted to work with.
Of course I’m looking forward to everything, but the festival will be opened by Henning Lundkvist and Ingri Høyland. Henning is a writer, performer and visual artist. I asked him if he could do a text-based piece because I really like his performances, and I suggested something about breathing, something metaphorically related to the organ. But now I think he’s doing a text about draft beer and lungs. I don’t know what it’s about, but it doesn’t matter – I trust him. Then he asked if he could invite Ingri to score it and we were very open to that.
In a way, the whole idea of the festival is encapsulated in asking a writer to create a text-based performance piece for the event, which is just as justified as asking a composer to write a musical composition for the main organ. At least, that’s how we see it.”
P/A: But now that you’re talking about it, it feels like you have a lot of influence as a curator. It’s not just about choosing the lineup, it’s also about choosing the themes that the artists want to deal with.
JHS: “We have a dialogue with each artist, and I think for some artists it’s nice to have that collaboration with the curator, so you don’t just come in, perform your piece and leave. Some artists feel safer that way, especially when they’re working out of their comfort zone. I think I have a lot of power in curating, but I think all curators have that power.”
Organ Sound Art Festival 2024 takes place December 12-15 at KoncertKirken.
